“I thought,” he explained, “that she was confessing to a craving appetite and wished my assistance and advice. I imagined, then, that I knew the reason of my invitation. I was a physician from a foreign land and, as I must soon return to my own country, her secret with me would be as good as buried. I explained that I could do nothing for her without the full confidence of her father and mother. She took this natural suggestion as if it were meant to be humorous. When she had stopped laughing she told me that the Japanese are perfect dears and horribly cute. Then she asked me if I didn’t love—what was it she asked me that I loved? I forget. You see we Japanese have few words to express the affections and use those sparingly. And now,” he leaned eagerly forward, “I want to ask you whether that young lady was charming?”
I tried to evade by asking him what was his idea of charming.
“That’s just what I don’t know. I was told that she was beautiful and charming. I could see that she was beautiful. Then I asked people what charming meant. They all told me something different.”
“You can’t define charming,” I hazarded. “It’s something different from a mere attribute. Foreigners always say that Japanese women are charming.”
“Then she wasn’t charming,” he decided judicially.
Several times I have been so rash as to try to explain to men of other nations how much an ordinary American conversation should be discounted. I fear that they did not accept my formula but held to the extremes, either continuing to take us literally or not believing us at all.
After Hori had discovered the untoward action of the first inn in adding rocking-chairs and bureaus to its equipment, he hurried down the street and warned the shopkeepers whom he could find to stop any two wandering seiyo-jins and direct their attention to the new inn. They must have been impressed that the affair was one of moment.
We heard O-Owre-san, the feared critic of varnished, golden-oak-pine bureaus, coming up the stairs. A striped, blue kimono made in Japanese standard length somehow does not suggest dignity when worn by a more than six-foot foreigner with a beard, but O-Owre-san came so solemnly across the mats in his bare feet that his ominous repression created its own aura of dignity. Something had happened, but he was not inviting questions.
Hori started in turn for his bath. I remained on my cushions. I sat and sipped my tea. O-Owre-san sat and sipped his tea. Hori with his secret of the rocking-chair inn had not been impregnable to questions. O-Owre-san was too dangerously calm. I waited.